The verdict

Jurors hoped to stick it to former SPD brass, not just the city. No such luck.

You’ve heard this story a million times:
Jury sits through a trial, listens in earnest, deliberates in good
faith, delivers a verdict. Then sometime later — usually just
as the credits roll, if it’s on TV — it dawns on the
ladies and gentlemen of the jury that the verdict won’t be
carried out in quite the way they meant for it to be. Maybe the bad
guy will get out of prison sooner than they thought, or the party
they intended to hold responsible won’t actually have to pay.
It’s one of those quirks of the American justice system that
has no apparent cure. You’d have to stuff jury boxes with the
kind of people who understand legal hocus-pocus (aka lawyers), and
nobody wants that. Luckily, they’re making smarter jurors
these days — jurors who have watched an episode or two of Law & Order or The Practice. They
realize they’re tippy-toeing through a minefield of
wherefores and whatnots, hoping to avoid all the legal booby traps.
Take, for example, the jury who, just last week, sat through the
trial of former Springfield Police Chief John Harris and former SPD
Commander Dan Hughes. Harris, you recall, resigned from SPD in 2003, shortly after a reporter discovered he that had
allowed a rookie named Renatta Frazier to suffer almost a year under
the excruciating — but patently false — accusation that she
had failed to prevent the rape of the teenage daughter of a fellow
officer. That mess was just the capper to Harris’ colorful
eight-year career here. Before the Frazier scandal, there was the
January 1999 “Office Tavern incident,” in which a group of
off-duty officers beat up some poor schmuck who happened to ding one of
their cars in a bar’s parking lot. The officer Harris ultimately
fired for that melee, Dan Patterson, was later acquitted by a jury and
reinstated by an arbitrator. But last week, Officer Rob Fleck tried to
convince a federal jury that he, too, had been fired because of the
Office Tavern debacle. Fleck — whose only role in the beating
was trying to stop the fight and calm people down, according to
witnesses — claimed that Harris wasn’t satisfied with
the way in which he testified against Patterson and blamed him for
Patterson’s acquittal. Harris subsequently fired Fleck — twice
— but for reasons that he claimed were unrelated to the bar
brawl: once for mishandling evidence from a pair of suspected drug
dealers and once for calling in sick two days during the Illinois
State Fair. An arbitrator later ruled that Fleck’s handling
of the drug evidence was “egregious” and
“foolhardy” but not a firing offense and ordered him
reinstated. The city then gave Fleck a choice of resigning
over the sick-time issue or being charged with perjury for testimony in
a federal trial [see “SPD’s revolving door,” April 3,
2003]. Fleck refused and eventually won his job back, but not before
losing more than a year’s worth of pay. The jurors who sat through this tedious
testimony ultimately agreed with Fleck, finding that Harris, the
city, and, to a lesser extent, Hughes (who was head of SPD’s
internal-affairs department during the relevant period) had
violated Fleck’s rights to freedom of speech and due process.
Which brings us to the questions of how much
money Fleck should get and who should have to pay it. Complicating
these questions was the concept of indemnification — the
protection a municipality provides to its employees, ensuring that
they can’t be financially penalized for doing their jobs.
Indemnity applies for wages and compensatory damages but not for
punitive damages. During deliberations, jurors sent the judge
two questions showing that they were struggling with dollars and
sense. One note asked: “Who is responsible for back
pay?” Another note asked: “Can we designate for each
defendant the amount of back pay?” The judge — with input from both
side’s attorneys — responded in writing. On the first
question, the judge wrote, “All three Defendants, City of Springfield, Hughes, and Harris are
responsible for back pay.” On the second question, his answer was
a simple no. That’s pretty clear, right? So the jury
awarded Fleck $51,000 in back pay but nothing in compensatory or
punitive damages — which means that the city will write Fleck
a check for the total and Harris and Hughes will pay Fleck nothing,
not one ding-dang dime. This math was surprising news to one juror
contacted days after the trial. “The way we understood it, they were
each going to pay equal portions,” he said. “We were
all under the impression it was going to be thirds.” They wanted to teach the defendants a lesson
but not bankrupt them. “Any settlement would’ve been an
attempt to tell them not to do anything like this in the
future,” the juror said. “For Hughes to shell out
$17,000 and Harris to shell out $17,000, we thought it was
plenty.” That’s why the jurors didn’t add
punitive damages. For Fleck, contacted through his attorney, the
jury’s ruling is bittersweet. “To watch those two grovel in court and
cry and be scared to death that they would lose their jobs —
that was worth $1.5 mil right there,” Fleck says. “But
they only got to feel that for 24 hours; I had to feel it for 13
months.”